“Oh, shit,” Martins said suddenly, and went on the unit push. “Halt. Halt convoy. Halto.”
As usual, some of the indigs weren’t listening. The Mark III provided a more than usually efficient cork, and this time they didn’t have to worry about someone driving an ancient Tatra diesel up their butts. Silence fell, deafening after the crunching, popping sound of heavy tires on gravel and dirt. The dust plume carried on ahead of them for a dozen meters, gradually sinking down to add to the patina on the roadside vegetation.
“What’s the problem?” Jenkins asked.
“The bloody Mark III, that’s the problem,” she ~replied, staring at the bridge.
“Hell, it hardly tears up a dirt road,” the sergeant protested.
“Yeah, it distributes its weight real good—but it’s still all there, all 150 tons of it. And no way is that pissant little bridge going to carry 150 tons. Vinatelli!”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“You’re going to have to take that thing and go right back to Ciudad Roco,” she said. What a screwup. She must be really getting the Boonie Bunnies to have forgotten something like this. “Because that bridge isn’t going to hold that monster of yours.”
“Oh, no problem, El-Tee,” Vinatelli said.
His voice was irritatingly cheerful. The voice of a man—a boy—who was sitting in cool comfort drinking an iced Coke. A boy who’d never been shot at, who hadn’t spent four years living in the daily expectation of death; not the fear of death, so much, as the bone-deep conviction that you were going to die. Who’d never fired a whole magazine from a M-35 into the belly of a Glorio sapper and had the bottom half of the torso slide down into the bunker with her while the top half fell outside and vaporized in a spray of fluids and bone-chips when the bagful of explosives he was carrying went off . . .
“Yeah, well, I’ll just drive down the bank and up the other side,” he went on. “Lemme check. Yes ma’am, the banks’re well within specs.”
Martins and Jenkins looked at each other. “Corporal,” the lieutenant went on, “the water’s about sixteen feet deep, in the middle there. The rains are just over.”
In fact, it would be a good time for an ambush ~attack. Luckily the Glorios had been pretty quiet for the last three months. Doubtless waiting for the 15th to withdraw, so they could try final conclusions with the indigs. So that what was left of them could.
“That’s no problem either, ma’am.” A slightly ~aggrieved note had crept into the newbie’s voice. “Like I said, we’re completely air-independent. The sonics say the bottom’s rock. We’ll manage.”
“How come everything’s screwed up, but we can still build equipment like that?” Jenkins said.
Martins laughed. “Great minds,” she said. “Fuck it, we’ve got a spaceship ready to blast off for the moons of Jupiter, and the government’s lucky if it collects taxes on three-quarters of the country. They can’t get their shit together enough to pull us out.”
The Mark III was edging down the bank of the river. The banks were steep, in most places; right next to the first abutments of the bridge they’d been broken down in the course of construction, and by erosion since. Still fairly rugged, a thirty-degree angle in and out. A UATV would be able to handle it, and even swim the river gap against the current—the spun-alloy wheels gripped like fingers, and the ceramic diesel gave a high power-to-weight ratio.
The tank wasn’t using any particular finesse. Just driving straight down the slope, with rocks cracking and splitting and flying out like shrapnel under its weight. Into the edge of the water, out until the lower three-quarters of the hull was hidden, with the current piling waves against the upstream surface—
“Lieutenant Martins,” the over-sweet voice of the AI said. “I detect incoming fire. Incoming is mortar fire.”
A section of Martin’s mind gibbered. How? The hills all around would baffle counterbattery radar. The rest of her consciousness was fully engaged.
“Incoming!” she yelled over the unit push. All of them dropped down into the vehicle’s interior and popped the covers closed above them. The driver turned and raced the UATV back down the length of the convoy, past ragged indig troopers piling out and hugging the dirt, or standing and staring in gap-mouthed bewilderment.
Then the bridge blew up.
“Eat this!” Jenkins screamed.
The 35mm grenade launcher coughed out another stream of bomblets. They impacted high up the slope above. Return fire sparked and tinkled off the light sandwich armor of the UATV; a rocket-propelled grenade went by with a dragon’s hiss just behind the rear fender and impacted on a cargo truck instead. The ~indig troops hiding under the body didn’t even have time to scream as the shaped-charge warhead struck one of the fuel tanks built into the side of the vehicle. Magenta fire blossomed as the pencil of superheated gas speared into the fuel. Fuel fires rarely cause explosions, contrary to innumerable bad action shots. This was the rare occasion, as the ripping impact spread droplets into the air and then ignited them with a flame well above even the viscous diesel fuel’s ignition point. A ball of orange fire left tatters of steel where the truck had been, flipped over the ones before and behind, and nearly tipped over the racing UATV.
The little vehicle’s low wheelbase and broad build saved it. It did slow down, as the driver fought to keep control on the steep slope above the road.
“Now!” Martins shouted, rolling out the back hatch. Riverez followed her, and they went upslope at a scrambling run until the trunk of a long-dead tree covered them. She knew that the bruises along her side would hurt like hell when she had time to consider them, but right now there were more important matters.
Shoonk. Shoonk. Shoonk.
The mortar fired again. The result was the same, too. Not much of the Mark III showed above the water and the tons of iron and shattered concrete which had avalanched down on it five minutes before. One set of 5mm ultras was still active, and it chattered—more like a high-pitched scream, as the power magazine fed slugs into the plasma-driven tubes. Bars of light stretched up, vaporized metal ablating off the depleted-uranium bullets. There was a triple crack as the mortar-bombs exploded in midair—one uncomfortably close to the height that its proximity fuse would have detonated it anyway. Shrapnel whamped into the ground, raising pocks of dust. Something slammed ~between her shoulder-blades, and she grunted at the pain.
“Nothing,” she wheezed, as Riverez cast her a look of concern. “Armor stopped it. Let’s do it.”
It would be better if this was night; the Glorios didn’t have night-vision equipment. Even better if this was a squad; but then, it would be better still if the Company was at its regulation hundred and twenty ~effectives. Best of all if I was in Santa Fe.
She and the other Company trooper spread out and moved upslope. Martins had keyed the aimpoint feature of her helmet, and a ring of sighting pips slid across her faceplate, moving in synch with the motions of her rifle’s muzzle. Where she put the pips, the bullets from the M-35 in her hands would strike. Sonic and IR sensors made the world a thing of mottles and vibration; it would have been meaningless to someone untrained, but to an expert it was like being able to see through the gray-white thornbush.
“Left and east,” she whispered, sinking to hands and knees. The heat signature of the ancient .51 heavy machine-gun was a blaze in the faceplate, the barrel glowing through the ghostly imprints of the thornbush. It was probably older than she was, but the Soviet engineers had built well, and it was still sending out thumb-sized bullets at over three thousand feet per second. They would punch through the light armor of the UATVs without slowing. The AKs of the guerilla riflemen supporting it were vivid as well; the men were fainter outlines.
“Pineapple.”
“In position.”
“Now.”
She slid the sighting ring over the gunner a hundred meters away and squeezed her trigger. Braaaap. The burst punched five 4mm bullets through the man’s torso. The high-velocity prefragmented rounds tore into his chest like point-blank shotgun fire, pitching him away from his weapon and spattering blood and bits of lung over his loader. The other guerilla was fast and cool; he grabbed for the spade grips and swung the long heat-glowing barrel towards her. Braaap. A little high that time, and the Glorio’s head disintegrated. He collapsed forward, arterial blood and drips of brain sizzling on the hot metal.
The riflemen were firing at her too, and she rolled downslope as the bullets probed for her. It was about time for—
Thud-thud-thud. Pineapple’s grenade launcher made its distinctive sound as it spat out a clip of bomblets. They were low velocity, and there was an appreciable fraction of a second before they burst among the enemy. Fiberglass shrapnel scrubbed green leaves off the thorny scrub; it also sliced flesh, and the riflemen—the survivors—leaped up. Perhaps to flee, perhaps to move forward and use their numbers to swamp the two members of the 15th. Martins fired until the M-35 spat out its plastic clip. The UATVs were shooting in support from the edge of the road, effective now that the Glorios were out of their cover. By the time she slapped in another 50-round cassette of caseless ammunition, they were all down, caught between the two dismounted troopers and the machine-guns from the road.